Debut Albums, Engagement Parties & Proverbs For Idiots

We're catching Tiny Little Houses frontman Caleb Karvountzis in the middle of his engagement party preparations. His fiance works full time, he explains, so the planning responsibilities have fallen on him. They're catering for 100 people, but Karvountzis seems pretty relaxed - "it's very exciting, it's keeping me busy".

Tiny Little Houses burst onto the scene in 2015 with the single, Easy, off their debut EP, You Tore Out My Heart. The release saw the quartet swiftly snapped up by Ivy League Records, as well as booking behemoths WME. Now the Melbourne lo-fi noise/folk act are inching towards the release of their debut record, Idiot Proverbs, and we ask Karvountzis just what kind of idiot proverbs we're in store for, given that so many of their recent songs - Milo Tin, Entitled Generation, Garbage Bin - trail the world-weary attitudes of millennials who have been hard done by by those before them. In Entitled Generation, Karvountzis sings, "I'm 25 and still not living out of home/Got two degrees and I'm stuck working on the phone/So, damn our entitled generation... I hear inflation keeps on going through the roof/But baby boomers got two condos left to spruce/So, damn our entitled generation." Depressing maybe, but not wrong. 

"I think [that first line is] everyone in the band!" he laughs. "Sean [Mullins]'s a music lawyer, so he's quite a skilled person... But I've been living at home and we're all about 25, and I think we can all just relate with that feeling of not meeting your own expectations and floundering around a little bit. That was the other thing on this album," he sighs. "I feel like we all got taught... we all got told that 'you can be Prime Minister and you can be an astronaut if you just set your mind to it', but it's just not the reality of how the world is. I think that's contributing to the world's [poor] mental health and it's not a very good way to look at life, to always be aspiring to be something great when [the] reality is that the vast majority of us won't be something great. And that's ok and the world needs to continue with people who DON'T aspire to be great, but they're happy and they're comfortable with where they are in life. I think that's something that as a society we need to be more comfortable with: limiting our expectations.

"I think that the reason why I write all those songs in that kind of way [is] because I do believe it in a lot of ways. I do actually think that we as a generation are, you know, we have it pretty good - we have it pretty bad as well," he contemplates aloud.

Garbage Bin is bleaker still, a song written initially with the late Fergus Miller of Melbourne act Bored Nothing and re-recorded after his passing last year.

"That song was pretty personal to me. That one I recorded initially with my friend Ferg from Bored Nothing who passed away and it was pretty bleak already but became more bleak after he passed," Karvountzis remembers.

"When I re-recorded it, I changed some of the lyrics to reflect that, but yeah. There's just a natural range of emotions - you're gonna have times when you're really bleak and down, but there's always hope. I think that that song sounds weirdly joyous at the same time, because I think once you get something off your chest, then you can feel better about it. That song [is] definitely [that] for me, that when I sing it, and when I wrote it, I got it off my chest and it felt fantastic."

Karvountzis' astute, though somewhat wry, observations don't really accurately portray how he is as a person. He's chipper and excitable when talking about music he's inspired by (Neutral Milk Hotel, Elliott Smith, Modest Mouse, Weezer) and just one scroll through the band's social media feeds show a mischievous, meme-loving persona - not the ones flooding your Facebook newsfeed and created by ten year olds these days, but the super-odd, offbeat ones you find trawling the depths of Reddit. He says he loves anything to do with Clive Palmer and Mr Rental. But then one post from October hilariously declares: "no more memes we r a serious band only from now on and u will respect us ok". It all seems at odds with the jaded, distrustful nature of so many of their tunes, but Karvountzis explains he's no longer at the place he was when he was writing Idiot Proverbs.

"I think now, most of the album I don't even really connect with that much because I'm in a really good place and I feel really happy. I'm getting married, just everything's going really good. But things can easily just go just as bad on the other end and that's just the experience of life," Karvountzis adds matter-of-factly.

"It felt like there was a lot of stuff I needed to get off my chest and since writing and recording all those songs, I probably haven't written for, like, months and months. Only the other week I started writing [again]. Stuff started coming out again."

He describes himself as "not a political person", but a fly-on-the-wall observer of society. "I'm not trying to make something political and I'm not a political person, but I like to look at society and stuff. I guess that's what the album's about - being interested in society and history and philosophy, but you're not really that much of an intellect but you just wanna have an opinion. That's kind of where I'm coming from. I don't really take myself too seriously on it - that's just kind of what I observe.

"I'm not trying to take shots at anybody - more just trying to take shots at myself but through the lens of, like, being caught in the middle of it all. I'm quite a religious person so I see things from quite a religious side, I see things from the secular side, and I feel like I've got a fairly good middle ground between both points of view."

Karvountzis and bandmate Al Yamin are of the Jehovah's Witness faith, meaning they "stay neutral in everything from voting to going to military service". Christmas, birthdays, Easter and the like are also not traditionally celebrated. When pushed on specific political topics, he adds, "I don’t really pay much attention to politics … We just stay out of it - it's none of my business to talk and impose on other people what they do, so I just look at it from afar."

All the while, also watching from afar was Winterman & Goldstein director and the band's A&R, Pete Lusty, who quickly became obsessed with Tiny Little Houses' distinct "disaffected youth" writing style and personalities. "When we saw them play the tracks [from Idiot Proverbs] live for the first time it was like watching a whole different band. It really did rock and Caleb had all this personality going on," says Lusty.

"To me they come across like a bunch of misfits. They don't look like a band and they aren't really part of a cool scene or anything. Caleb is this skinny indie kid, Sean has metal hair and matching mo, Al and Clancy [Bond] are 'fully heaps nonchalant' but are actually really tight and powerful. They each have their own personality and it's fun to watch. They will blow everyone away!"